I was kind of excited about this piece when I heard about it, because I thought could potentially replace my aging MPC1000 in my live set.

So, I got my hands on one, and my feeling about it is less like disappointment, and more like AMAZEMENT with how incredibly bad it is.

It simply can not play back a sample like the sample sounds. It is inherently flawed at the very basic level.

I made a video:

It can not trigger a sample without cutting the first 1 or 2 ms off the beginning, so forget about any transient sounds at all, and the amount missed varies each time. This variation is not due to any modulation, velocity, start point setting, or any such thing.

Besides this, there is another problem, demonstrated by this youtube user:

There are, for some reason, no proper reviews of this unit. Only some unboxing videos and some stoner who's only playing the built-in sounds (which trigger fine by the way).

I've done some sniffing around this problem are any of you using the converter or raw files?...
If not, can someone try to get into the pad calibration menu? (select + and volume - on the MPX8, but I don't know on the 16)
Here's the 808 kick from the MPX8 sample pack available here

The top wave is an 808 kick one converted with the MPX16 file conversion utility, the other is the stock 808 kick right out of the zip...

it seems to have cut the sample down to exactly 128kb and truncated the tail, the MPX8 can handle a whopping 4 minutes of data if properly converted such as this Russian Dance Track

I'm going to buy an MPX16 soon and figure out this problem, send a patchfix to Akai so they can get off their duffs and keep on putting out excellent gear

This is what happens when you race to the bottom on price, although to be fair even the MPC2500 had quite coloured DA conversion. When I moved my old band's live set over from the MPC to the Octatrack everything all of a sudden became clearer and punchier, even stuff that I'd originally sampled on the MPC. Comparing the DA stage of a $200 unit with Maschine (I imagine you're running out through an interface that cost a lot more than $200) just isn't a fair fight.

It's a really cheap DA stage. The MPC60 was really expensive when it was new, it had engineers working hard to make it sound as clean and good as possible, regardless of the cost or the sample rate. The MPX was made as cheaply as possible, it's the exact opposite in design philosophy.

Stab Frenzy wrote:It's a really cheap DA stage. The MPC60 was really expensive when it was new, it had engineers working hard to make it sound as clean and good as possible, regardless of the cost or the sample rate. The MPX was made as cheaply as possible, it's the exact opposite in design philosophy.

I don't even know where they found a D/A converter that bad, it sounds worse than the converter in a $20 chinese mp3 player.